Best and Worst of ... Reset Buttons

[scotpens]

. . . any episode which proposes a major change in the structure of the universe or the daily life of the crew, but then rapidly resolves the issue at hand in the last few minutes of the episode so that things are restored to their normal structure.

On smaller scales, some poorly done resets are Uhura’s reeducation in The Changeling and Spock’s inner eyelids in Operation: Annihilate! The latter gets bonus points for resetting one of the worst subplots in the franchise.

I think, by the above definition, those cheap, hokey resolutions qualify more as dei ex machina. Perhaps somewhere between a deus ex machina and a full reset are the “Who gets to die and get doubletalked back to life this week?” episodes -- Scotty in “The Changeling,” Chekov in “Spectre of the Gun,” McCoy in “Shore Leave,” and Kirk in a grand total of THREE episodes: “Amok Time,” “The Enterprise Incident” and “The Tholian Web.”

 

[stj]

Year of Hell is overrated. The problem is not the so called reset button, though. The problem is that a lot of what happens is absurd. The final shot of the first half, with the lifepods fleeing the ship, is striking. But if you stop to think, the notion the crew would find it easier to get through the Krenim empire that way is preposterous. The notion that the main cast would then keep the ship repaired and fighting/fleeing is absurd. The notion that the ship could be such a wreck and actually do anything, much less go anywhere borders on the insane. It only gets a free pass because, as a two parter, it all goes by in something of a blur. All that lunacy about the supposed drama in a wrecked Voyager is barely enough to fill a two part episode, much less a season. The whole series? The idea is crazy.

Fortunately the intrinsically silly Year of Hell has Annorax. The so called reset is a wonderfully ironic resolution to his story, which is actually interesting.

The Visitor is an excellent episode, reset button or no. Missed The Children of Time but I never quite bought Odo/Kira.

Timeless is good too, and it's all about reset.

Course: Oblivion is no more a reset than Deadlock. In both, people die. If it can matter when duplicate John Crichton dies in Farscape, it can matter it can matter when duplicates die on Voyager. Besides, death was a recurring theme on Voyager.

I'm not quite sure we could legitimately accept the phrase "reset button" as meaning anything. It seems to just be a pejorative. The dramatic irony in Year of Hell flows very naturally from the premises. But on a show like the new BattleStar Galactica, which in many ways seems to be Ron D. Moore's psycho version of Voyager, in one episode Adama overthrows President Roslyn in the season finale. Half a dozen episodes into the new season, the fleet is back together, Roslyn is Presisdent again but Adama is still commanding. Indeed, things are so back to normal that he is personally responsible for maintaining loyalty to her, just like in the first episode. The whole thing is so undone they fall in love later on. Yeah, right.

At one point, the whole series sets up shop on a planet, is bopping along under an incompetent leadership, then brave Adama saves the remnants of humanity, leading a ragtag fleet to safe haven on Earth. In other words, the whole series was reset! Unlike Star Trek, whose resets involve monkeying around with temporal mechanics or other handwaving technology, this sort of thing is supposed to just happen naturally. Yeah, right (to reset myself, I suppose.)

My suggestion is that complaining about a reset is like just saying something is boring: It's just static, doesn't mean anything.

 

[Pauln6]

Year of Hell is overrated. The problem is not the so called reset button, though. The problem is that a lot of what happens is absurd. The final shot of the first half, with the lifepods fleeing the ship, is striking. But if you stop to think, the notion the crew would find it easier to get through the Krenim empire that way is preposterous. The notion that the main cast would then keep the ship repaired and fighting/fleeing is absurd. The notion that the ship could be such a wreck and actually do anything, much less go anywhere borders on the insane. It only gets a free pass because, as a two parter, it all goes by in something of a blur. All that lunacy about the supposed drama in a wrecked Voyager is barely enough to fill a two part episode, much less a season. The whole series? The idea is crazy.

The dramatic irony in Year of Hell flows very naturally from the premises. But on a show like the new BattleStar Galactica, which in many ways seems to be Ron D. Moore's psycho version of Voyager, in one episode Adama overthrows President Roslyn in the season finale. Half a dozen episodes into the new season, the fleet is back together, Roslyn is Presisdent again but Adama is still commanding. Indeed, things are so back to normal that he is personally responsible for maintaining loyalty to her, just like in the first episode. The whole thing is so undone they fall in love later on. Yeah, right.

At one point, the whole series sets up shop on a planet, is bopping along under an incompetent leadership, then brave Adama saves the remnants of humanity, leading a ragtag fleet to safe haven on Earth. In other words, the whole series was reset! Unlike Star Trek, whose resets involve monkeying around with temporal mechanics or other handwaving technology, this sort of thing is supposed to just happen naturally. Yeah, right (to reset myself, I suppose.)

My suggestion is that complaining about a reset is like just saying something is boring: It's just static, doesn't mean anything.

But the premises of Voyager and NuBSG are similar: if you have a limited pool of talent, what can you do if the leadership falls out, or makes a mistake? It's not as unlikely as it sounds - in the last two UK governments, our Prime ministers and their chancellors were often arguing and disagreeing on policy but they kept on compromising and working togeether because there were limited alternatives.

If Year of Hell had been spread over half a season or more, obviously not every episode would have been just about the Krenim. Another missed opportunity on Voyager would have been to relieve Janeway of command for part of a season - ill health would have been fine but a mutiny or a (voluntary) resignation before or after a board of inquiry as a result of a bad decision would have been even better. This would have given Beltran and Mulgrew a chance to play with very different aspects of their characters with Janeway becoming more like a Guinan figure for a while until like Lon Suder she had to step up and save them ready for the reset button.

Obviously that would count as an ongoing plot so it would have been nixed but I would have enjoyed it.

 

[Anwar]

But the point still stands that even in nuBSG they did these reset buttons where everyone was still back to the way they were before, plot-wise and emotionally. Sure, maybe we got one or two episodes of aftermath but after that it was business as usual.

 

[Pauln6]

I think Apollo was the character who suffered most from the reset button. The Pegasus situation was probably the biggest example of a reset, where even Duala, who had been promoted to a Lt and first officer ended up back in the same job she had as a petty officer. There were other instances of officers being insubordinate that were forgotten a couple of episodes later too.

I'm not sure I agree about the Adama-Roslin dynamic though. They had a lot of differences over the series. Just because they reached a compromise doesn't count as a reset in my view. They were just learning to take the measure of each other.

Still, I thought BSG did a far better job of carrying the ongoing plot forward than Voyager. Sometimes resets are the best option I suppose. If you need to use the reset so that the series carries on then so be it. If Voyager had been destroyed, how could the series have carried on? The crew as farmers on a rock planet running an intergalactic hotel for passing life forms with Janeway in the role of Granny Clampett?

'Ensign Kim, set the replicator for possum, we've got visitors!'

 

[Danny99]

I do agree that The Visitor is the best, but I'd like to throw Twilight out there. I thought in addition to being a decent episode, it's reset button was good.

 

[Smalley]

Times Arrow, Yesterday's Enterprise, and the Visitor are my favorites. Year of Hell was a bit silly. It might have worked better if Kes' absence hadn't caused a paradox and it would have been a more fitting exit for her character if she had been involved in breaking the time loop somehow.

I like it too, but they just complete a time loop in that one, with no real reset button...

 

[Pauln6]

Times Arrow, Yesterday's Enterprise, and the Visitor are my favorites. Year of Hell was a bit silly. It might have worked better if Kes' absence hadn't caused a paradox and it would have been a more fitting exit for her character if she had been involved in breaking the time loop somehow.

I like it too, but they just complete a time loop in that one, with no real reset button...

If I'm honest, the closed loop is my preferred method of fictional time travel and the fun comes in seeing how the loop is closed. The theory goes - you can't go back in time to change the past because if you go back in time, you ARE the past, and since the past has already happened, you ALWAYS were going to go back in time and whatever happened while you were there is exactly what always happened. I think it causes some people, particularly the writers more of a headache than the sloppier 'many worlds' theory but I never understood how a time traveller could go back in time 'for the first time' just because they travel back from the present - it strikes me as a very illogical concept...

The biggest plot hole in FC is that the borg would understand the theory and would understand that time travel is rather pointless. If it wasn't pointless then why not travel in time as a standard part of the assimilation process?

It also means that the 'original' pre-NuTrek universe was actually about the tenth alternative universe that our heroes have been 'diverted' into and it makes the temporal police (even more) non-sensical.